Quotes you can use to start conversation or to add interest to speeches or presentations

Death and Funerals Quotes

Death and Funerals

I even forgot I was ill and reverted to the old fond fantasy that I will die peacefully on my 90th birthday at my thatched beach house on Lake Malawi and my girlfriends are so upset, they have to take the day off school.

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had. (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross)

Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead.
When Death claims the light of my brow,
No flowers of life will cheer me: instead
You may give me my roses now!

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die. (Forrest Church)

Woman forcing herself to make the necessary calls to tidy up her husband's business after he died, one of the creditors said to her "I can't say I know exactly how you're feeling, but I can say I was in the same situation a few years ago. It was a rough period of my life, but it didn't last. Things will get better for you, too. It's hard to understand that right now, I know, but a brighter day is just around the corner. You just hang in there."

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. ~From a headstone in Ireland

Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. (Mark Twain)

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. (Clarence Darrow)

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan

It's better to burn out than fade away.

"I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money.""

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Suicide: a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~Mark Twain

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. ~Henry James

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable

"The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive." - Ernest Becker, American cultural anthropologist, 1925-1974

I personally want to 'do' death in the active and not the passive. And to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.(Christopher Hitchens)
"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it." - William Somerset Maugham, English playwright and novelist, 1874-1965

"Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination; try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, American poet, writer and lecturer, 1860-1935

"After your death you will be what you were before your birth." - Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher, 1788-1860

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." - Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political and spiritual leader, 1869-1948

"Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time." - Susan Cheever, American author, 1943-

"Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows." - Pope Paul VI, Italian pope, 1897-1978

"Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist." - Epicurus, ancient Greek philosopher, BC 341-270

"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead." - Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist, 1879-1955

"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die." - Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter and inventor, 1452-1519

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time." - Mark Twain, American writer, 1835-1910

"The idea is to die young as late as possible." - Ashley Montagu, British anthropologist, 1905-1999

"If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death." - Charles Sanders Peirce, American mathematician, 1839-1914

"I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen, American playwright, 1935-

"Death was Nature's way of telling you to slow down." - Terry Pratchett, English science fiction author, 1948-

"It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you're dead, you're made for life." - Jimi Hendrix, American musician, 1942-1970

A 18th-century wine-trader in Sicily famously wrote home, to his sister in Britain: “Your son has died, send out another”